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Your galleryShower Below the Summit
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Compare the dark, rain-wrapped base with the clear upper slopes and the clouds behind, then follow the zigzag of lightning at the lower right.
Clear weather holds at the summit while a thunderstorm darkens the slopes below, and lightning cuts across the bottom of the sheet. The Cleveland Museum of Art suggests that Hokusai designed this view as a partner to the clear-weather Red Fuji, to show the mountain in changing weather. Fuji had long been revered as a holy mountain, the Art Institute notes, and in Hokusai’s time pilgrims came to it from every part of Japan.
Color woodblock print; oban · 25.7 × 37.6 cm · Art Institute of Chicago
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Shower Below the Summit (Sanka hakuu), from the series "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)"
- Artist
- Katsushika Hokusai
- Date
- c. 1830/33
- Medium
- Color woodblock print; oban
- Dimensions
- 25.7 × 37.6 cm (10 1/8 × 14 9/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Clarence Buckingham Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.